GeoFeed: A Location-Aware News Feed System

This paper presents the GeoFeed system; a location-aware news feed system that provides a new platform for its users to get spatially related message updates from either their friends or favorite news sources. GeoFeed distinguishes itself from all existing news feed systems in that it enables users to post message with spatial extent rather than static point locations, and takes into account their locations when computing news feed for them. GeoFeed is equipped with three different approaches for delivering the news feed to its users, namely, spatial pull, spatial push, and shared push. We design a smart model for GeoFeed to decide about using these approaches in a way that: (a) minimizes the system overhead for delivering the locationaware news feed, and (b) guarantees a certain response time for each user to obtain the requested location-aware news feed. GeoFeed also supports location-aware news feed function for its mobile users. Experimental results, based on real and synthetic data, show that GeoFeed outperforms existing news feed systems in terms of response time and maintenance cost.